so zack is leaving tonight. it was really enjoyable to have him around for a couple of weeks. yesterday we drove out to banff, which is a small alpine town nestled in the center of a national park reserve. it was a bit chilly (though i'm sure zack would label it as simply "too cold" ;) but enjoyable. we ate in the nearby town of canmore at a vegetarian restaurant. it was the first time he'd been in the rocky mountains, so that was a nice way to cap off the visit.
i wrote in a recent blog entry about novell taking glx development internally. there have been a few updates since then.
dan kegel brought it up on the desktop architect's list and nat replied that they are planning to release the code in february at xdevconf. when asked if this was going to be simply a code dump, nat said, "Total merge, long term useful. One tree to rule them all, etc." we'll see when february rolls around, but i'm hopeful. i think most of nat's rationalizations for the situation were weak and i still believe it was a non-optimal move on their part. let's hope things can come back together because we're all (novell included) best served by that.
but meanwhile the non-novell developers have not been able or willing to sit still waiting for a future event. as zack noted in a recent blog entry a bunch of xgl code has been committed to the official x.org tree by these people.
this means we officially have a fork between the code bases. i was hoping this would be avoided, but given the circumstances it was highly probable. how this pans out will have to wait for february and beyond. hopefully the two trees will eventually become one, be developed openly in the x.org repository and bring our scarce graphics development resources back together again.
happy new year everyone!
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Strange that after all this talk, David Reverman dumped a tarball on the xorg mailing list today: http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/xorg/2006-January/011922.html . What's going on?
> What's going on?
hopefully the start to a better, more open approach to developing xgl. =)
i assume it'll be somewhat messy in the beginning (you can't fork a project for the better part of a year and then not have it messy when you merge code bases back), but that's ok. the end result is important, and i'm optimistic that will mean an openly developed set of opengl technologies around x.org.
If you're really looking for people to blame for the merge hassle we're now facing, blame me for not getting 7.0 out the door in anywhere near the projected schedule. It's hard to commit things when the tree stays frozen for so long.
We've been having pretty okay success with merging in the older xgl stuff into the main server tree. As far as I've seen that's not wasted effort, the work done on that would have needed doing for this most recent drop anyway. Most of it is due to xgl having been developed against Keith's kdrive tree instead of Xorg, so if you're going to talk about part A being forked from part B, realize that's been the case for over two years now, and isn't really David's or Novell's fault.
oh, i wasn't looking to blame anyone; just wanted to set up realistic expectations for people who may figure this could all be finished by tomorrow afternoon. ;)
there's still lots of work to be done, and not just the merging of the trees. but forward progress is very encouraging and as things continue (i hope!) to move forward i'll be one your cheerleaders and supporters (in addition to a consumer of your work =)
I know that's not the place however I would like to thanks you for your work for KDE, good job guy.
a french user of linux.
Too bad the Slashdot article covering this didn't link to your original blog entry.
Who would have thought Canmore would have a vegetarian restaurant!
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